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Digital Dip

“We don’t want to play trial and error here,” said City Comptroller Scott Stringer.

More than 2.2 million residents of New York’s five boroughs are without broadband Internet access at home.

That is 29 percent of city households – more than 917,000 homes.

Local officials are raising new concerns about what impact this digital divide will have for the efficacy of the 2020 U.S. Census – the first ever to be conducted primarily online.

A new report from the Comptroller Scott Stringer is sounding specific alarms about an undercount and its repercussions for New York.

At a press conference on Tues., July 23rd, Stringer warned that a Census undercount could jeopardize $5.8 billion in federal funding, which would hit low-income New Yorkers the hardest.

“The very people who may need more federal support are the most at risk of going uncounted,” Stringer said.

In the Hunts Point and Melrose neighborhoods of the Bronx, for example, 48 percent go without home Internet.

“This is an important fight,” said Congressman Adriano Espaillat.

In Chinatown and the Lower East Side, 50 percent of residents do not have home Internet access, the report said.

The report also found that 42 percent of city residents 65 and older lack home Internet.

While some New Yorkers without home service could opt to access the Census via their smartphones, Stringer said it was not a reliable option.

“The bottom line is, we don’t want to play trial and error here,” he said.

Congressman Adriano Espaillat, who noted that his district of Washington Heights and Inwood had the city’s highest response rate during the last Census in 2010, attributed that success to community outreach, with “an army of enumerators” knocking on doors.

He said that avoiding an undercount will still be a challenge, even though the Trump administration abandoned its efforts to include a citizenship question on the 2020 Census.

“This is an important fight. It has not ended with the citizenship question. Now we have another fight which is to make sure that those neighborhoods in Internet deserts are included in the count,” he stated.

Stringer called on the Census Bureau, which has committed to providing paper forms to about 20 percent of the U.S. population, to prioritize communities with low rates of broadband Internet access for the paper forms.

He also recommended that digital resources be expanded at public libraries, which he said would play a vital role in providing internet access.

“If anything is going to work, it’s going to work within libraries,” he said.

Stringer also called for the city to install interactive kiosks in trusted locations throughout the city, and ensure Census workers with translation skills are enlisted.

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